I’ve proposed here before that technological advances could simply greatly boost the carrying capacity of the planet — leading to more environmental losses — unless human values shift along with our intellectual and technological potency. So is this evolving worldwide web of intelligence, on its own, sufficient to do what Mr. Cascio proposes?

For those who want more, I’ll shortly post a version of “9 Billion People + 1 Planet = ?,” a talk I’ve given off and on about this moment on an increasingly human-shaped Earth, which reminds me of the juncture between adolescence and adulthood. The punch line? What do we want to be when we grow up?

Andy – not as bad as some I’ve read, but a difficult area to try any kind of coherent essay. First, I think there’s serious issues about how one defines intelligence these days, given that we’re dispersing cognition across a number of information and communication systems. Memory, for example, used to be considered the sin qua non of human intelligence (as it remains in oral cultures); now Google has become an extraordinary mass memory. “Computers” were humans before they were machines; now, of course, “mere computation” isn’t considered indicative of naïve intelligence. So the concept of intelligence is not only complicated by our usual arguments about whether it’s unitary or there are different flavors (“emotional intelligence”). It is a contingent concept that changes depending on our technological context, and because that’s changing rapidly, so is our definition. And it’s not clear how yet. Second, notice how he tends to fall back on the individual – that Cartesian worldview is awfully embedded in Western thought, and it may well be obsolete. Straws in that wind might include Google, which networks memory, and the augcog systems that the military (and companies like GM and Ford on the civilian side) are developing that network perception and consciousness (what military augcog does is scan battlefield environments, identify potential threats, prioritize them, and feed information to the soldier as (s)he is able to comprehend it. It doesn’t get more real than that.). The question, then, is what intelligence means when cognitive systems evolve into networks, rather than individuals (this has always been the case with a social species like us; it’s a question of degree and accelerating rate of evolution of networked cognitive systems). Also, I think he’s too gentle in suggesting that either individuals or cultures will be able to choose not to enhance. Folks in places like BRIC countries [Brazil, Russia, India, China] are well aware that these are potent technologies in terms of cultural authority and power over time, and those who eschew cognitive enhancement at any level are likely to fall behind. And the social phenomenon that arises when large groups of people become unable to engage with rapid rates of change is fundamentalism of all stripes, from religious to environmental.

Effect on sustainability? Simply that the sustainability discourse generally has a really, really hard time engaging with emerging technologies and their implications, not to mention the inherent complexity of these systems, which means that, in some very important ways, it’s obsolete. The sustainability discourse is an Enlightenment phenomenon in a post-Enlightenment world, and one hopes it grows up before it becomes totally irrelevant.

This article is pretty good, but not pathbreaking or especially insightful. Phil Campbell had a good series on Performance Enhancement in Nature last year. The E.U. financed a good U.K.-based project on it. In the U.S.A. the DoD among others has done a lot.

There is the converse hypothesis promoted by the late William Hamilton, about the Planetary Hospital, in which we all will harbor lethal or debilitating mutations (poor eyesight) and survive by continual intensive medical intervention. Humanity has replaced selection-after-birth (infant mortality), which tended to get rid of weaker genes, with selection-before-birth (abortion), which, unless one does a lot of genetic testing, makes the surviving pool of humans potentially more needy – including of performance enhancement.

In any case, the drive for performance enhancement is relentless.

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.